A brain circuit linking pain and breathing may offer a path to prevent opioid deaths
When people feel pain, they tend to breathe faster. When they take an opioid to ease that pain, their breathing slows. And if they overdose, respiration can stop entirely.
Now scientists have discovered a brain circuit in mice that appears to explain how opioids affect both pain and breathing, a team reports in the journal Neuron.
The team also found evidence that it's possible to separate these effects, potentially allowing for pain drugs that don't affect respiration.
If the finding holds up in people, "it's possible that we can develop safer analgesics," says Sung Han, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego.
That's a "really important goal" in a nation where opioid overdoses kill more than 100 people a day, says Dr. Kevin Yackle, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/22/1066011236/a-brain-circuit-linking-pain-and-breathing-may-offer-a-path-to-prevent-opioid-de
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